Greg Reddick is a noted speaker, author, and software engineer. This blog covers all aspects of programming, particularly for Windows, and other related topics.

2016-11-12

Password Won't Work

Okay, this one was kind of trivial, but it took a little time to debug it, and I'm trying to document the things that I have to debug. I figure that if I have to debug it, someone else may be running into the same problem. That someone else might be me a few years from now.

A Windows Update of SQL Server on my web server was causing it to partially hang at boot. This was keeping other parts of the operating system from booting, and make the Remote Desktop part of the network driver to not get any CPU time. Remote Desktop to the web server stopped working. I went to the server rack and tried to log in. It didn't accept the password. Arg, now what do I do? I'm locked out of the server.

I booted from the operating system disk and created a command prompt. When I tried changing drives, something mysterious showed up. It was not echoing the key I was typing on the keyboard. Oh, duh! Due to space considerations at the server rack, what I was typing on was one of those small keyboards that has a keypad overlaid on some of the letter keys, instead of a separate keypad. NumLock was on! Thus I was typing numbers for part of the password. Reboot, turn off NumLock, and it logged in fine.

Next step is to disable NumLock permanently at startup. This link gives three ways of doing that. Then on to fix my hang problems.